#resonance structures

[er-cryptid]

[mumblingsage]

I think I've recommended it in passing a few times, but writers seeking more craft books: I would run, not walk, in the direction of Matthew Salesses's Craft in the Real World. It's one of the most exciting books on writing that I've read in years (up there with Ron Carlson Writes a Story, Samuel Delaney's The Jewel-Hinged Jaw, Kim Addonizio's The Poet's Companion and June Casagrande's It Was the Best of Sentences, It Was the Worst of Sentences). I think it might be most helpful if you've already read some other books on craft--it's a sort of 201-level response to 101-level advice, and if you aren't familiar with the 101 advice you might miss some of the significance. But parts like the revision exercises definitely stand on their own.

Salesses re-evaluates and explores a lot of common writing ""rules"" with the understanding of how culturally contingent they are, and how this is a disservice to writers and readers from backgrounds and cultures outside the presumed "norm." At the same time, he offers modifications of the tools and new techniques/new ways of thinking of old techniques. I'm in the middle of his re-definitions of terms. For instance, Salesses recommends looking at Characterization as "What makes one character different from everyone else." Character + Story Arcs are "What changes or fails to change." Craft itself is "a set of expectations."

Lightbulb moments everywhere.

(While I'm sending out book advice: for less 'exciting' but super solid grounding in techniques designed for nonfiction but applicable broadly, try anything by Roy Peter Clark. Ursula K. Le Guin's Steering the Craft is short but rich; it's one of my first recommendations to writers just getting started on reading craft advice. In the Palm of Your Hand is another poetry workbook that has advice on vocabulary, detail, and narrative that applies well to fiction too. For anyone looking into self-publishing, it's out of print and parts are dated but if you can secure a used copy through your library or secondhand sales, Catherine Ryan Howard's Self-Printed: The Sane Person's Guide to Self-Publishing is hugely informative and amusingly written.)

[caesarsaladinn]

I got tired of autocorrect’s bullshit, so I decided to just own it. behold: the aromatic flag.

[materialsscienceandengineering]

Advanced nuclear magnetic resonance technique reveals precise structural, dynamical details in zeolites

Zeolites are widely used in many industries, yet their intrinsic catalytic nature is not completely understood, due to the complexity of the hydroxyl-aluminum moieties. Atomic-scale analysis of local environments for the hydroxyl species is essential for revealing the intrinsic catalytic activity of zeolites and guiding the design of high-performance catalysts. However, many unfavorable factors prohibit the elucidation of their fine structures such as low quantity, meta-stable property, structural similarity, hydrogen-bonding environment, and long-range disordered nature. Recently, a research team led by Prof. Hou Guangjin and Prof. Chen Kuizhi from the Dalian Institute of Chemical Physics (DICP) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) unraveled the precise structure of complex hydroxyl groups in zeolites with a comprehensive set of self-developed coupling-edited 1H-17O solid-state nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) methods. The study was published in the Journal of the American Chemical Society.

Read more.

[letters-to-rosie]

so I feel like I'll be wrestling with this forever

This pageantry of strike/counterstrike that ensues throughout Nancy Jane Smith’s interrogation betrays a proclivity to imagine political conflict, which is to say “affilial” (meaning, political and institutional) struggles, through filial (meaning, family) frames. Questions of citizenship and state power that would ordinarily be categorized as affilial dilemmas, questions of institutional power, are displaced onto questions that would ordinarily be categorized as filial, questions of family loyalty. The interrogation weaves a tapestry of articulations, “connections, transfers and displacements,” between affilial frames of reference and filial frames of reference in which the stability of the White family becomes hegemonic throughout the interrogation, while questions of political power (Nixon’s war machine and the scourge of capitalism) become secondary, at best. What this framing mobilizes is a deep unconscious saturation and naturalization of White family authority as state authority, wherein “characteristics of the family are projected onto the social environment” in such a way as to allow for “no disproportion between the life of the [White] family and the life of the [state].” (Frank Wilderson, Afropessimism)

[commsroom]

when it comes down to it, however much i think about eiffel's memory, whatever my reasoning might be, i think there's a much simpler core explanation for why i feel the way i do. i've said before that, if eiffel did regain his memory, i would want it to happen through 'an eiffel version of change of mind' i.e. a personal inner journey where the narrative he tells himself amounts to some greater reminder, self-confrontation, and self-realization. and that's just it:

eiffel regaining his memory wouldn't be a cop out to me for the same reason that lovelace not actually dying isn't a cop out: it's not just a story beat, it's a catalyst for character development & a better understanding of lovelace as a person. eiffel has spent his whole life trying not to be the person he is, and i just don't feel wolf 359 is the type of story to let him off the hook for that, when the ending is as much about accountability (to ourselves and to others and all the ways those responsibilities overlap) as it is about hope. i think there are ways you could argue that eiffel can still be eiffel without regaining his memory, but i think i've convinced myself that the symbolic resurrection / self-confrontation and acceptance of all the people he's been in the past, in order to move forward, is the more compelling option, especially for what it parallels, and the "eiffel is still eiffel" part is non-negotiable. it doesn't even feel like a question to me.

(and it makes the most sense to me in the context of eiffel's survivor's guilt - "of course i was fine. the driver's always fine." - and tendency towards a type of self-sacrifice and self-punishment that the show ultimately denies him / that doesn't address his real problem. he thinks sacrificing himself for the people he cares about will make up for something, but it won't. having him make that sacrifice and then keep living and keep being doug eiffel, with everything that means, feels like the natural extension of constructive criticism.)

in another story, or in a more theoretical context, there are all kinds of questions you could ask about whether eiffel's memory loss means he's a different person now, but in this case... i think it's better understood in narrative terms and what it represents for him as a character than any broader philosophical conclusion about the nature of the self and human consciousness. (and it is in no way as absolute as people sometimes behave like it is, considering he still has a concept of, like... everything. but that's a whole other topic of discussion.) most importantly, i just don't believe wolf 359 is a story about ideas as much as it is a story about people, these people, and in order to (hypothetically) continue to tell a story about doug eiffel, well. he has to still be doug eiffel. one way or another.

[lost-rxverie]

the ochem gods have smiled upon me i got a 90% on my midterm AND it was curved up to an A

[variousqueerthings]

no other movie experience has ever made me feel so strangely disconnected from others as poor things. constantly trying to exorcise it from my mind, only to keep stumbling over things talking about how life-changing it is. gotta stop being an obsessive person and just let it go, but i always want to know what im missing and i just cannot see it, so. gotta just put it down

[fox-bee926]

Why is it the more i study chemistry the more made up it sounds

[obeetlebeetle]

john gaius is a bluebeard canaan house his castle the locked doors to lyctorhood conceal his many dead wives, the cavaliers, the bloody secret

[shesgonnachangetheworld]

the difference between a well written death in serialized fiction and a badly written one is almost 90% in the aftermath, which is why so many main/side character deaths are unpopular tbh

and like, it's possible that it's my own grief weighing on me talking, but people really do notice when a character is treated as disposable in the narrative versus when a character's death is given emotional weight. the death of people you love, hell, even the death of people you just kinda like but see regularly, leaves a hole that's really difficult to navigate around (especially when you're expected to just keep on with your scheduled life unchanged). and if you can't convey that when you kill off a regular character, people are going to respond to that negatively, because it rings emotionally false

[girlstressed]

EUGHHH did so ass on that orgo quiz

[iturbide]

How old would be like, an actual adult for a manakete? Nowi's "1,000 something" and she seems. Like a child. Tiki's what, like 3,000? She seems like an adult... is it like humans x 100? How does the dragonstone thing work? Are they born with them now or does each generation have to seal their power in stones? Do taguel actually need stones or is that a gameplay mechanic?

At least for me, I tend to interpret dragon ages along the lines of human age x 100 based on what we've seen in most of the Fire Emblem games. Tiki when she meets Marth is somewhere in the neighborhood of 1,100, but she looks like a kid -- at best a very young teenager, more likely a preteen, so 10-11 range by my read. Nowi, similarly, says she's over 1,000 and both looks and acts like a kid, so I struggle to see her as older than a teenager (and a particularly childish one at that). By the time of Awakening, though, Tiki's around 3,000 years old, and is clearly an adult at that point, so that really does seem to line up with the dragon age being two orders of magnitude removed from the human equivalent.

As for the dragonstone thing...that's open to interpretation, I think. I know some people interpret them as something dragons create themselves (@anankos has a fun bit in one of their old Fates fics that goes into it), but in Awakening it's frustrating because dragonstones are sold and they come in multiple flavors. Awakening why do you do this to me.

So I've tentatively adopted a concept where dragons (and taguel) use a specific type of stone as a form of energy storage: specific stones have a crystal matrix able to receive magical energy, and by taking advantage of this specific resonance, dragons can siphon their power into the stone in their possession and adopt a human guise; if they need to transform, they pull the energy back out to resume their original form.

Of course, I'm damned either way because Awakening's mechanics make no sense and a dragon/taguel can't transform without a stone, leaving them trapped in a human guise -- which frankly makes no sense: if the stone breaks, the power can't go anywhere but back where it came from, so logically they should be stuck in beast form rather than the other way around. So I picked my battles and decided that when I work with dragons and taguel, if they don't have a stone, they don't look human. (On a related note note, if a dragon or taguel loses their stone but it doesn't break, they'll be stuck in human form for a while but eventually revert back to dragon form if they don't find it because eventually their energy levels are going to replenish naturally and they'll transform back whether they like it or not. Nowi has this problem...a lot.)

[thedreadvampy]

christ almighty some people are sad fucking miseries huh

[bug-bytes]

Who came up with studying? This shit sucks